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Poetry Writing Exercises: Freewriting and Poem Building

Today’s poetry writing exercises will show you how to build a poem from the ground up.

We begin by using freewriting to create a supply of raw material. Then, we’ll sift through the material, using bits and pieces to put together a solid foundation for our poem to stand on.

Next, we add structure – beams, walls, and a roof, giving our poem its form. Finally, we put on the finishing touches, adding fixtures and hanging curtains, polishing our poem to completion.

You’ll find that building a poem isn’t much different from building a house or putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Of course, this is just one technique for making poems, and if you like it or find it useful, then you can use it again and again.

Poetry Writing Exercises

I’m especially excited about these writing exercises because freewriting is one of my favorite writing practices, especially for poetry writing. However, once you’ve worked through the process, you will see how these exercises can be modified and applied to prose.

Poetry writing exercises are meant to be fun but also challenging. You should enjoy yourself but you should also be stretching your literary prowess as you work through the steps, making your way toward a completed poem.

These exercises follow a very particular process with some suggestions for variations and alternative applications that you can use to customize the process to better suit your own writing preferences.

Step One: Gather Your Materials

Your first task is to complete a freewriting session. Sit down in a comfortable place, either with a pen and notebook or with your computer. For a little creativity enhancement, you might play some inspirational music in the background.

Start writing. Write whatever comes to your mind, however ridiculous or obscure. In fact, the more ridiculous or obscure, the better.

Keep the session going for at least ten minutes. Twenty or thirty minutes is even better. Don’t stop writing at any point during the session. You should be scrambling frantically to get all the thoughts and images out of your mind and onto the page.

For more details, check out my article on freewriting.

Step Two: Pick and Choose

Now, step away from your freewrite. Try to let it sit overnight or for a few days. At the very least, let it sit for a few hours.

When you’re ready, come back to your freewrite with a pen and a highlighter (you can use the strikethrough and highlighting features in your word processing software if you’re working on a computer).

Go through the piece using your highlighter to call out words and phrases that stand out. Look for excerpts that use interesting language. Highlight anything that paints a vivid image, evokes emotion, or tickles the senses.

Next, use your pen to cross out words and phrases that are unappealing. Strike anything that sounds flat or boring. Eliminate sections that are overly repetitive, that ramble incoherently, or are simply uninteresting.

Step Three: Create a Foundation

Now you have your raw material. The sections you’ve highlighted are your building blocks. You can type these in a new document, or write them on a piece of paper or on a set of note cards.

The purpose of this step is to pull all of the usable words and phrases from your freewrite and separate them so that you can use them to build the structure of your poem. You might set aside a folder or box and place all your usable material in it, then revisit it from time to time and use that material to make poems.

You can work through these early steps as often as you like, generating freewrites and then filtering through them with your highlighter. The more you do this, the more raw material you’ll have at your disposal. Over the course of a few months, you might practice freewriting every day, but only use your freewrites to make poems a couple of times a month.

Step Four: Build the Structure

Now that you have your raw material in hand, start arranging it on the page. If you’re working on the computer, you can use cut and paste. If you’ve used note cards, you can spread them out on a table, trying different arrangements. Or, you can simply use a pen or pencil to write them in your notebook and make notations about placement.

As you work through this process, you may find that fresh images, words, or phrases pop into your head. Add these to the mix.

This is the most creative step in these poetry writing exercises. You might collect tens or hundreds of freewrites, or you might create a big box full of note cards that contain words and phrases for poetry building. You can revisit the structure-building step time and time again using the raw materials that you’ve created and collected over time.

Be adventurous and take risks. Try combining words in new and unexpected ways. Be on the lookout for language that sounds cliche, and look for alternative wording. Continually ask yourself if your lines paint a picture (or a series of pictures), if they appeal to a reader’s emotions, or if they trigger the senses, evoking a physical reaction in the reader’s mind.

Give yourself plenty of workspace and creative wiggle room. The materials you are using are much like puzzle pieces, and you’ll need to sit and try to fit them together in a coherent way. In the end, you should have your clippings arranged in some order that makes sense. You’ve got lines, the rough draft of your poem.

Step Five: Finishing Touches

Once you’ve got a basic structure for you poem, type it up (or write it down) in completion. This is another good time to take a break. Step away from the piece for a length of time.

When you return, read the poem aloud. If you’ve taken time away from the poem, you’ll be able to read it with a fresh perspective. Look for areas where the poem loses continuity. Scan for repetition. Read and listen to make sure the poem’s rhythm is intact.

As you do this, make notes. You might jot down something like “this word doesn’t fit with the voice,” “this line breaks the rhythm,” or “this image is cliche.”

When you’ve gone through the entire poem a few times, go back and edit, making changes to fix whatever you thought was broken. Polish, edit, then repeat.

You will find that in most cases, you’ll repeat this step several times over. You read the poem, make some notes, apply the changes. Then, when you read it back the second time, you find new areas that need improvement or sections that you missed in your previous review.

Some writers say that a piece is never truly finished. That means that if you keep reviewing the same piece over and over, you’ll keep finding things that you want to change. At some point, it’s time to declare your poem finished, so that you can move on to your next project. Try not to get tangled up and caught in a vicious cycle of editing.

Variations

As with all poetry writing exercises, you should allow yourself to play around with the process so that it suits your personal writing style. Here are a few ideas for variations:

• Practice freewriting every day to build a huge storehouse of raw material.
• Go through your freewrites with a highlighter regularly and capture the highlighted portions on note cards. Store these somewhere and use them randomly to make poems.
• Try working through these steps with prose. This is especially useful in literary writing. If you have a short story with a solid plot and compelling characters, but are struggling with language, any poetry writing exercises, including this one, will help you develop better wording and phrasing for your prose pieces.

As always, have fun with these poetry writing exercises. And keep on writing!

Do you have any poetry writing exercises to share? Have you tried this one? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

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